We gather at the armory to take on our weapons and ammunition loadout for the mission. I’m surprised to see that Phalanx’s armory has SRA weapons on the racks, because when Dmitry and the SRA team step up to the window, they receive their own standard rifles, not our M-90 or M-95 heavy anti-Lanky weapons. The Sino-Russian guns have a lot in common with ours—we took some design and function cues off their rifles when we designed our own—but the ammo isn’t interchangeable, and I figured they’d issue them our guns to keep resupply simple.
When it’s my turn at the window, I take a pistol out of habit, even though the tiny little fléchettes from the M109 service handgun are useless against Lankies. Then I receive an M-95 autoloading rifle that looks so new that it probably still has factory grease in the action. I plug the rifle into my suit and let the computer in the gun talk to the one in my armor. There’s a calibrating target on the far bulkhead in the armory, and we all take turns sighting in our weapons. My helmet visor displays the targeting reticle of the rifle on the calibrating target and reads the output from the laser mounted parallel to the barrel, and it takes just a few seconds for the armor’s data unit to calculate the ballistic trajectory from this specific weapon seamlessly from point-blank range to a thousand meters, adjusted for Mars gravity and atmosphere.
We are just finished with the weapons issue and filling up our magazine pouches when the 1MC comes to life overhead again.
“All hands, this is Colonel Yamin. Listen up.”
We all interrupt our activities to pay attention to Phalanx’s skipper.
“We have reached the forward edge of the battle area with Task Force Red. Mars isn’t far, we have the first Lanky targets in our Orion missile envelope, and we will be in combat soon. This is not the first time this ship has gone up against the Lankies, which is not something that many Fleet units can claim. I have the utmost faith that this ship and her crew will complete her assigned mission, and that Phalanx will bring us home when this is all over.”
Colonel Yamin pauses for a moment, and the area in front of the armory is as quiet as can be except for the soft, delayed translation I can hear from the earpieces of the SRA team.
“I have been ordered to share a message before we go into battle. As of this moment, every ship in this task group is playing a similar announcement from the leader of its alliance or commonwealth. All hands, stand by for the president of the North American Commonwealth.”
There’s another short pause on the 1MC, and then a new voice comes on, one I’ve heard before both in Network news footage and in person, on the hangar deck of NACS Regulus during Colonel Campbell’s posthumous Medal of Honor ceremony a few months ago. It’s the voice of a woman speaking with a faint southern drawl that reminds me of most of the pilots I’ve ever known.
“Men and women of the Commonwealth Defense Corps, and members of our allied forces,” she says. “I’m not very good at profound speeches. I am an old fighter pilot, and our communications tended toward brevity unless we got drunk in the O Club together after missions. But I would not be a very good president if I did not see you off with the best wishes of the rest of us, those who have no choice but to wait for the outcome of a battle that depends entirely on you all.
“Sitting here in this office, knowing what you are about to face and not being able to be up there with you is the hardest thing I’ve had to do since taking this job. There’s very little I wouldn’t give for a shot at a seat in a Shrike cockpit right now, sitting in the docking clamp and waiting to take the fight to the enemy. And make no mistake: you, all of you, regardless of the nationality patch on your armor, are fighting the true enemy. You are going into battle against the worst threat we as a species have ever faced, the threat we should have been preparing for all these years instead of killing each other. You are about to fight the most important battle in the history of the planet, and you are going to bring us back from the brink of extermination.
“Be assured that everybody looking to the stars tonight wishes you strength, courage, and skill in battle. I join them in this even though I know that you already have all those things in abundance. It’s an honor and a privilege to be your commander in chief, and I know that you will do us all proud.
“And as an attack-bird jock, let me add just one more thing. If this is the day you get to claim that seat at the table in Valhalla, make sure you arrive there with your magazine pouches and ammo racks empty, and a pile of dead Lankies behind you. Good hunting.”
We don’t break out into wild cheers like the ragtag resistance forces in some corny military movie on the Networks. Instead, we just grin at each other, and some of the troops nod approvingly.
“Top shit, that speech,” the Spaceborne Rescueman says next to me, and continues filling his magazine pouches.
“We make it back, she has my vote,” I say.
In almost two years of garrison duty and standard drop-ship deployments, I had almost forgotten just how small a ballistic bio-pod actually is. The thing itself is fairly large on the outside, but a lot of that size is shielding and barrel sabot. The pod has an irregular surface to mimic a natural piece of celestial debris, but it needs to be launched from the ordnance tube of a cruiser, so there’s a sabot liner wrapped around the pod that separates from the pod as soon as it’s out of the launch tube. The walls of the pod are also pretty thick, to survive the thermal stress of atmospheric entry, so the actual passenger compartment is much smaller than the overall size of the pod would suggest. Whenever I step up to an open bio-pod right before deployment, I am uncomfortably reminded of their resemblance to coffins.